for me yes totally OTT.but then you can't please everyone and i expect some people will find them totally acceptable.

Actually, I agree and do find most of the HDR images I have seen as being OTT. But I have to tell you, all the colours you see in the Toronto city hall are pretty much there, as well as the red aura in the sky from the lights of the downtown city core. So the scenes colours are OTT all by themselves! Here is another version where I attempted to remove the green-yellow cast created by the lights under the arches. I will try to reduce the red in the sky to what I saw.

I also found the HDR program leaves a lot to be desired, with most images being soft. It is difficult to get a more subtle and realistic look than is often admitted. The program seems to have difficulty registering despite all the measures I take to ensure trueness. Perhaps I should avoid zoom lenses. I am still experimenting and my friend and I just wanted see how this HDR method would work with city skyline images. Green-orange is by far the most prevalent of the many colour casts given off by city lights. They often look quite garish. However, your point is taken and when my experiments are done, I doubt I will persue this kind of photography, except for fun and on rare occasions. C'est la vie.

I dont think there are any theoretical limits to how large the DR of monitors and projectors might become? With LED or another efficient source of light, the peak brightness can be very high without needing a nuclear powerplant in the room next-door. Blacks may be limited by display/screen reflectivity, wall/floor/roof reflectivity and presence of bright sources or light (such as bright image pixels).

For paper the limit seems to be in the 100:1 range until we find something blacker than charcoal.

In my opinion HDR is a Love/Hate thing. I have seen some really crappy and weird looking HDR images although im sure that some people out there like that style. its not for me. On the other hand I use HDR when the use of a neutral gradient filter would kill the details in an uneven horizon. I dont want the tops of my mountains to look dark and the bottoms bright. I take particular care to produce an image that doesnt look crazy, but accurate to what we see with our eyes. Sometimes its just the better option.

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"Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the Earth are never alone or weary of life" - Rachel Carsonwww.NaturesLightandMagic.com

I posted this image in the Landscape and Nature section but I am also adding it to this thread as I am interested in the use of HDR for dealing with exposure problems.

In this case the "correctly exposed" version was taken at 1/400 at f/9, ISO 200 in Aperture Priority. Because the histogram showed both burned out highlights and dense shadows, two more exposures were taken at -2EV and +2EV and then combined with the "middle" exposure in HDR Efex Pro from within Lightroom.

The middle image did, indeed, have small areas of burned out highlight and, more importantly, large areas of shadow on the left-facing walls of the mill where no detail was visible. Combining the three images in HDR allowed those problems to be corrected to the extent that the left-facing walls are still clearly in shadow but some stonework detail is visible. (which is much closer to what the eye could see)

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« Last Edit: February 26, 2012, 08:01:30 AM by PhotoEcosse »

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************************************"Reality is an illusion caused by lack of alcohol."Alternatively, "Life begins at the far end of your comfort zone."

I had tried that, Slobodan, but no amount of "Fill Light" in LR would bring back any detail in the shadows of the original image. Only the +2EV exposure had the detail you can see in the HDR version above. I probably could have reduced the highlights with the "Recovery" slider but (in LR3) that would have affected the whole image. In HDR Efex Pro, I was able to attack the highlights selectively using the Control Points.

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************************************"Reality is an illusion caused by lack of alcohol."Alternatively, "Life begins at the far end of your comfort zone."

Not if it has been beyond the dynamic range of the sensor. The Fill and Recovery functions in Lightroom (or ACR) can only reveal what was captured by the sensor in the first place. When only one end of the histogram is "off the scale" then a different exposure might have been better; but when both ends are off the scale, then the sad fact is that the dynamic range of the scene was greater than current sensors can cope with (that image was with a Nikon D300). New generations of digital sensors will undoubtedly have greater DR capabilities.

« Last Edit: February 26, 2012, 01:59:15 PM by PhotoEcosse »

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************************************"Reality is an illusion caused by lack of alcohol."Alternatively, "Life begins at the far end of your comfort zone."

Not if it has been beyond the dynamic range of the sensor. The Fill and Recovery functions in Lightroom (or ACR) can only reveal what was captured by the sensor in the first place. .....New generations of digital sensors will undoubtedly have greater DR capabilities.

And new generations of LR can make older RAW files look sharper [Process Version 2010] and increase Dynamic range too [Process Version 2012] when compared to images processed in older software. That's the beauty of RAW.Take this image. Flash failed to provide enough fill and sky was burnt out when I first tried processing this in 2006. However in LR4, it is vastly improved over previous attempts to process image and although it has a bit more of a HDR look than I like, I'm much happier with it. And this was only a quick tweak in LR4. I may go back later as I still think it can be improve upon.

OK, that's fine, I certainly don't expect everyone to dig these images. I was mainly responding to the suggesting that they look like 'renderings' which I took to mean fake.

I'm curious though about what you mean by low-contrast. With the exception of the last one, to my eye these all have a wide range of contrast. Some even have blowouts and pure blacks. So it makes me wonder what you mean by lack of contrast.

Renderings are good. They catch a person's eye. The person asks are those artists renderings or a photo or what? Then they require more study on the part of the viewer.

Now, I'm not sayin to grundge up every pix you get your hands on, but surreal has its place just as difussion does.

If you shoot an image with a 5DMII, one capture, is it HDR? If you shoot an image with the K5, one capture, is it HDR? If one is, and one isn’t, what makes them different? For that matter, enter any camera model and again, is a single capture HDR and if so (or if not) why?

If you take one capture on any camera system and bring it into what is called HDR software, is this resulting image HDR? If so why, if not why? Or is it just tone mapping?

If you take one raw image and render it two ways in your raw converter, but blend the two in Photoshop, is this HDR? I seem to hear many say its not (its Tone mapping. I agree). If you take one TIFF image and render it two ways in Photoshop and blend the two, is this HDR? Or is it just tone mapping (I’d say it is). If you take one image, TIFF or raw, render it two ways and bring it into what is called HDR software, is this resulting image HDR?

If you take multiple images that are bracketed and bring them into what is called HDR software, is this resulting image HDR? Based on the type of capture device, it always is, it sometimes is, it never is? For that matter, if you just took pieces of each and manually assembled them in Photoshop (NOT Merge to HDR), is this HDR?

Messy isn’t it?

We discussed this on another forum.

1 RAW image processed with 3 exposures in LR gives you HDR, at least more DR than you get without the 3 for 1 processing.